ABSTRACT

This paper explores how university staff in Denmark, Germany, and England perceived higher education (HE) policy as impacting the experience of being a student in their respective countries. While, in each nation, different policy mechanisms were identified as having triggered transformations in the experience of being a student, the transformations themselves were described in a strikingly similar manner across all three countries: staff stressed that students had become more instrumental in their approach to learning; that the student experience had become more circumscribed; and that students were under greater stress. We analyse how staff’s narratives about the impact of policy on the experience of being a student were mediated by their own ideas about what constituted ‘good education’, which in turn were strongly rooted in national traditions. Furthermore, in each country, staff’s assessment of the impact of specific policies on HE differed sharply from those of policy actors. Our findings contribute to the scholarship on the marketisation of HE, through drawing attention to how the rationality underpinning policy does not determine how it is engaged with by key stakeholders on the ground, and by demonstrating how the neoliberalisation of HE can unfold in different formats, some more explicit than others.

摘要

本文探讨了丹麦、德国和英国的大学工作人员如何看待高等教育 (HE) 政策影响他们在各自国家的学生体验。虽然在每个国家，不同的政策机制被认为引发了学生经历的转变，但在这三个国家中，这些转变本身的描述方式却惊人地相似：工作人员强调，学生在他们的学习方法中变得更加重要。学习; 学生的经历变得更加有限；并且学生们承受着更大的压力。我们分析了工作人员关于政策对学生体验的影响的叙述是如何通过他们自己关于什么是“良好教育”的想法来调节的，而这些想法又深深植根于国家传统。此外，在每个国家，工作人员对特定政策对高等教育影响的评估与政策参与者的评估截然不同。我们的研究结果有助于关注高等教育市场化的学术研究，通过提请注意支持政策的理性如何并不能决定当地关键利益相关者如何参与，并通过展示高等教育的新自由主义化如何以不同的形式展开，有些比其他的更明确。